1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to an improved data processing system and, more specifically, to a computer implemented method, a data processing system, and a computer program product for social profile assessment.
2. Description of the Related Art
On-line social communities such as Facebook, a social utility operated by Facebook Incorporated, and MySpace, a social networking service operated by MySpace Incorporated, allows a person to interact with individuals who they may initially know very little about, and may never meet face-to-face. The communication with these people may be exclusively electronic in the form of email, online chat, and by reading each other's Web presence in the social networking application. Knowing how to communicate more effectively with people met in these circumstances is becoming an increasingly important skill. Similar examples exist in the business community, particularly in large, distributed organizations, such as International Business Machines Incorporated.
Most social networking applications provide a way for a user to create a self-proclaimed profile from which others can infer certain characteristics about them. For example, in Facebook, a user can specify their tastes in music, political views, religious views and sexual preference, among other things. A drawback of these self-asserted claims is that there is little assurance of accuracy. A user could make claims that are not consistent with how that user is perceived among people who know them; “friends” in the context of the social networking applications.
In order to encourage a broader level of interactions within social networking applications and to meet one of the goals of the communities hosted, there is a need for a mechanism to provide a more trusted assessment of social style. A person could then reliably determine if another person is of a compatible social style, or provide guidance on how a user may communicate more effectively with that person.